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Yesterday's Leftovahs
Yesterdays's Leftovahs (Mr Creosote's Steel Stringed Sounds) is a 2005 acoustic album by solo artist Mr Creosote. The album consists mostly of acoustic versions of previous songs, primarily his biggest hits but also featuring some more obscure fan favorites. While advertised as "Live Unplugged and Untouched", the album was in fact put through considerable post production, despite consisting of low fidelity recordings, reverb and other effects were applied to the vocals and guitar to improve the listening experience. The majority of the songs consist of Creosote's vocals and acoustic guitar, primarily played by session guitarist Martin Greeves, the subject of Creosote's many "give it up fer Martin" chants live in the 2000s. To fill out sonic space Creosote made use of harmonies and backing vocals - all performed by himself - something uncommon in much of his discography until then. In contrast to the artist's previous album Eggs on Top, Yesterday's Leftovahs was widely praised and welcomed by Mr Creosote's fans. The famous journalist Herbert Dinkleferger described it as a "stab in the right direction", after his thorough condemnation of the artist's previous effort. It did draw some criticism for the timing of the release; almost exactly at the time Creosote Inc. was beginning to struggle financially and at the point where Creosote's career was clearly well past its peak. Background and Recording After completing the Eggs on Top Tour in 2004, Creosote was forced to attend to business matters as Creosote Inc.'s financial difficulties which had began the previous year worsened, and legal cases against the company mounted. He was able to stave off most of the legal troubles with out of court settlements, and managed to increase the company's income in several key areas to pay off some of its major debts. However, while the ship had been stabilized 2005, there was still a considerable uncertainty about its future. This coincided with Creosote's desire to "put a lid on" his career as it struck him it would soon be 20 years since his first album was released. For some time he simply intended to create a compilation album, however he was inspired to re-work some of his past songs and try to perform them acoustically after listening to his older works at length. He had Martin Greeves brought to his Scotland home on April 4th and created a few acoustic recordings in his living room using a bog-standard microphone recording into a Mac-book. The takes on this first day, of Feast For All, Bucket of Bourgeoisie and Mulberry Pie, would be the ones used on the album. Creosote was particularly happy with the new take on Bucket of Bourgeoisie, once a roaring post-punk clatter which used a riff from the band's earliest days, now a witty little acoustic folk tune. The recording was completed within a week, with another week for mixing and production before it was posted on a CD to the head offices of Big Boi records, to be received the following Monday by none other than Creosote himself, who delighted in pretending it was unexpected and somehow externally sourced by some means. It was only upon listening to the finished product it occurred to Creosote that he could add new songs. This led to the incorporation of a cover of The Sex Pistol's Pretty Vacant and an original song titled Tremblin' Trolly, in time for the album's release on 12th May 2005. Critical Reception The album was generally met with positive reviews on release. Many critics of his last album praised Yesterday's Leftovahs for stripping back the elements after the bloated production of so many of his past works, however others criticized the exceptionally low production values and argued the album was a cynical move with purely commercial motives. Others pointed out the Tracklist noticeably did not include some of Creosote's all-time biggest hits such as L'elegant Sunset. In The Times, Herbert Dinkleferger wrote: "I was concerned after the blaring catastrophe of Eggs on Flop and its tour we'd be seeing a real embarrassment here, a final nail in Mr Creosote's coffin. I was pleasantly surprised to see so many of our old favorites re-worked tastefully and with a new found freshness here. If Mr Creosote can somehow seize on the magic which regularly shines from the cracks of this imperfect little journey, it may well be he's not lost yet.". Former band mate George Hudson proclaimed: "Yeah, of course I wanted to hate it. I thought what a load of old cobblers when I heard about it, but I can't deny some of the tracks are quite irresistible.". This is thought to have contributed to their 2006 truce and eventual collaboration in 2007. Tracklisting